A bone to pick with museums

Returning collections of human remains to
their home countries may sound noble, but science will suffer
as a result, writes Tiffany
Jenkins

Museums are the storehouses of history: collections that
help to shine a light on the past. Amid their myriad objects
are many curiosities, including human remains, which add
detail to our impressions of how people once lived on the
other side of the world. They also reveal how cultures were
viewed and often misrepresented by the European explorers who
“discovered” them 200 or more years ago.

After lying in display cases for decades or even centuries,
the future of these resources is now uncertain. Pressure
groups in America, Australia, Canada and New Zealand have
undertaken a large-scale repatriation of these items, and in
many cases have buried extensive collections of human remains,
some of which once took pride of place in museum collections.

Now this trend has come to Scotland. Last week it was
revealed that two tattooed Maori heads collected by a Scottish
adventurer in the 19th century are to be sent back to New
Zealand.

In an echo of a case last year that saw three preserved
Maori heads and a leg bone returned to New Zealand,
councillors in Perth have decided that the elaborately marked
heads, known as toi moko, should be handed over to the
Te Papa museum in Wellington. Once returned, they will not go
on display or be available to the public or researchers. They
will be stored while the museum tries to trace the descendants
of the dead Maoris, who, if found, will decide the fate of the
two heads.

The heads were collected and brought to Perth in the early
19th century by David Ramsey, a ship’s surgeon, who had
studied medicine in Edinburgh and once lived at 40 Nicholson
Street.

Ramsey travelled extensively in the Pacific, acquiring
objects of interest along the way. He wrote to his brother,
James, about his voyages, which included stopovers in Jakarta,
the Indonesian capital, and Java, one of its islands,
detailing his growing collection of birds and insects.

In 1825 he sent a collection of curiosities, which included
the heads, to the museum of the Literary and Antiquarian
Society of Perth, the predecessor of the current Perth Museum
& Art Gallery. As Ramsey did not visit New Zealand, it is
believed he probably acquired the toi moko in
Australia, where he settled for some time.

Collecting curiosities was all the rage in Ramsey’s day, so
it is hardly surprising that so many scalps, skulls and
shrunken heads dating from that period are held in museums
across Britain. Some were taken in dubious circumstances,
others were stolen, but many were bought by Europeans simply
out of interest.

Ramsey’s toi moko will now go home after almost 200
years in Scotland. Michael Taylor, head of arts and heritage
for Perth council, said: “They are significant and sacred to
the Maori people. They believe they connect them to their
ancestors.”

But while the return of some objects may be justified, the
wider clamour for the repatriation of other museum items is
dubious.

Since the British Museum was founded in 1753, it has been
accepted practice for museums to collect human remains — from
ancient mummies to Victorian jewellery pieces containing locks
of hair. These body parts can unlock secrets about our past,
including patterns of human migration: who lived where, when
and with whom.

Ultimately, bones can help to reveal the story of human
evolution. They tell us about diet, lifestyle and the health
of previous populations. So research on this material is
important, both for our own knowledge and for that of future
generations.

Until recently it was not possible to remove items from
museum collections. Then in 2000, Tony Blair made a pledge to
return aboriginal remains to Australia, and the same year
Edinburgh University repatriated a large collection of
remains. The Human Tissue Act of 2004 granted some of leading
museums the power to transfer human remains from their
collections.

Perth and Kinross council’s policy in this area states that
it “acknowledges that additions to the collections . . . are
made in the belief that the material will be held in trust in
perpetuity” and that “there is the strongest possible
presumption against the disposal of any material from the
collections”.

This principle is central to the operation of all publicly
funded museums in Britain and is there to guard against the
influence of finance, fashion and politics — but in recent
years that principle has gradually been eroded. The
repatriation of remains has already had an impact, with
crucial material being destroyed.

This issue is about more than burying old bones, however.
Returning material to its country of origin is part of a
withdrawal from the pursuit of knowledge about humanity. It is
the mission to know more and to understand the past that has
been lost — the very spirit that helped to establish museums
in the first place.

At present the number of claims remains relatively small. A
survey conducted for a working group on human remains for
England and Wales found that of the 60 museums holding such
remains from overseas, only 13 had received requests for their
return. But the working group argued that “while the total
number of requests for return perhaps seems low at first sight
. . . it is essential to recognise that in many cases the
beliefs and emotions leading to individual claims are strong
”.

Of course, many of these claims are keenly felt. But
equally, large-scale and unique collections of valuable
material could be destroyed, when very little is known about
an object’s provenance.

In one case in America, a 10,000-year-old skeleton of a
woman from Idaho was discovered by archeologists and then
buried by local native Americans (Shoshone), even though the
ancestry, beliefs and religion (if any) of the woman were
unknown. That is vandalism.

The pleasure of visiting local museums is often to see
oddities that reflect the very birth of the idea of a museum.
And the spirit that drove Ramsey and other adventurers out
into the world is no more.

I don’t want to be too romantic. Museums are full of nasty
or odd things that are often in bad taste, irrelevant and
dusty. And some of the adventurers who found them held ideas
that are very much out of tune with our own. But the outlook
that sent them across the seas was progressive.

We should try to create a new thirst to know more and
understand the world today and not destroy evidence of the
past.

Tiffany Jenkins is director of arts and society at the
Institute of Ideas